Welcome to Your Monday!
I hope you are ready for another great week of productivity and self-exploration. I am.
I had a great weekend. I had my friend Ryan Hughes (a professional Motto-Cross coach who uses the CHEK system with his athletes) over for a day of relaxation. We don’t get to visit very often because Ryan travels the world teaching and racing.
We both love art so we get together when we can and create art together. Ryan likes stonework as well, so if we are up to it, we lift stones and make things out of them.
When Ryan showed up Saturday morning, it was raining quite heavily. I built a fire in the fireplace and we got out the art supplies and let our intuitions guide us.
I drew this vision of the stars interacting with the earth. My drawing is my inner vision of how the light of the stars (yang) creates levity, drawing life-forms out of the seeds of matter encapsulated in the earth.
When you consider that inside a star is highly compressed matter, from which the planets and moons ultimately emerge, the matter becomes something akin to a filmstrip being illuminated in the fires of transformation.
We all know that the myriad of life-forms at large grow toward the sun, or are enlivened by the sun. The water is a conductive medium with an almost infinite capacity to store information.
Where there is soil (ground stones and decomposing organic material), water, air, and sunlight, life as we know it emerges; without soil, water, air and sunlight, life can’t exist as we know it.
This is the play of elements.
A Hindustani poet says, “The desire to see the beloved brought me to earth, and the same desire to see the beloved I am taking with me to heaven.”
In his book, Spiritual Liberty, The Sufi Message, Volume 5., p. 144, Hazrat Inayat Khan says, “The Sufis say that the reason of the whole creation is that the perfect Being wished to know Himself, and dis so by awakening the love of His nature and creating out of it His object of love, which is beauty.”
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For many of us that read the teachings of such evolved spiritual masters, it can be challenging to understand, to rationalize the events of our lives, and of the world at large.
It can seem as if we are bouncing between heavenly experiences, experiences of hell, and everything in-between.
We can have such challenging relationships with people, and often the people we love, that our emotional clouds can block the light of the sun; we can find ourselves living such that we don’t even recognize the sun, the flowers, the animals, or the beauty of all those in our lives that indeed are loving us.
We can watch the news and see people being blown to bits over what amounts to turf wars over oil, resources and conflicts over religious “beliefs”. One can easily loose confidence in, and/or sight of any possible “God”.
Such people are often atheists. Some get so angry at God they go the other way and align themselves with cults motivated by evil (remember e-v-i-l is L-i-v-e (ing) backward); they are that confused and angry about God and all related.
Changing Perspective
We often forget how much torture, destruction and death we deliver to the other living creatures of the earth on a daily basis.
We could be a Buddha, yet while walking in the garden, killing a myriad of soil microorganism and other little creatures, we may not even be aware of it.
What might the little creature’s TV news reports be saying?
That we take animals, kill them, slaughter them, and then expose them to fire? If that’s not enough, we put them in our mouths, chew them to bits, and send them into a vat of hydrochloric acid, where any remains are dismantled to their most elementary parts the vegetarians just eat the little animals they can’t see on their vegetables and play a game that makes them feel better…
All the while, we consider that we are loving ourselves by feeding on the lives of other living forms.
All I’m sharing here is a perspective shift.
If you get back far enough from the earth, as in the photo I’ve placed above, we don’t see wars, violence, torture, racism, sexism, elitism, etc. We see the beauty of the earth as She goes through Her own evolution in the realm of planetary and star bodies. We see magnificence and beauty.
When I feel challenged by the events of the world, or events in my own life, or even in my own mind, I remind myself that God’s intelligence is of such a magnitude that Universes are created in and of it.
If I can’t understand God’s methods, then I can appreciate the beauty and grandeur we can see if we choose to see it.
I can trust that God (Consciousness if you prefer) is exploring God within so God can come to know God as experience; GOD IS timeless, God is All experience in time.
I know from my life of study that each living being is essentially a universe within universes. I know that the life of any being is in some way supportive of the life of other, or many other beings.
I know that regardless whether “God” exists, all we have is our beautiful planet, all the life-forms She contains, and each other.
Therefore, we need not be hung up on “God issues”.
When we realize that the circumstances of the world are such that we are all running out of clean water, functional soils, clean air, and that both nature and the human aspect of nature are showing great signs of illness, we can put any disputes about God aside.
We have only each other, together, as a means of solving our challenges.
Soon, no rich man’s wealth will be worth anything; what good will it do to offer someone a thousand dollars for a cup of water when that money has no inherent value!you can’t eat or drink money.
If God is learning anything through us, it is the process of learning to love; God is learning to love God through God’s gods. We are that process.
When we look at history, we see the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. We see massive empires being built, only to crumble over and over again. We see corruption (usually as greed) as the backbone of many such situations.
Today is a great day to become aware of a higher truth than law, which is love itself; when love is lost, law emerges!
Though love is hard to share with those that have hurt us, or even those we love, we can begin by sharing love with ourselves.
When we share love as intelligence, we at once can see that we can begin our love lessons where they are safe.
It is safe to love water. It is save to love the earth. It is safe to love animals. It is safe to love the sky that gives us breath.
In loving ourselves we participate in acts that are healing for ourselves and the world, we are at once loving the world and all the people herein.
Even if they are confused and make their decisions on pseudoscientific rationalizations of the economy, the greenhouse effect, of the use of chemicals, dangerous medical procedures and drugs, etc….
As we wear our own health and vitality, we also exude the wisdom that comes with it.
When people see and experience our health and vitality, they naturally become more inclined to emulate the healthy, because the evidence is right in front of them, breathing, sharing, and being.
It is my dream that we all return to embracing and living the basics.
It is my dream that we all come to realize that we are all part of, and intimate with each other.
We are all part of the universe. We all need the essentials, without which, your money, your fame, your “stuff” has no value what-so-ever.
The beauty of the approach I share is that there isn’t really any need to proselytize if we Self-Realize. No sane person can ignore the truth of another healthy loving person standing before them.
If we live with the knowledge and experience that we are loving the best we can, then death holds no leverage over us.
To die knowing you’ve done and loved the best you can is surely the only key to the door leading to genuine freedom and the experience of authentic love!
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
